Helpmaboab: In my previous posting, you quoted me (correctly) as expressing concern for the corporately-driven denial of real health scares and (predominantly) environmental problems, to which I find your response listing possible false alarms almost totally incredulous: Did you actually follow the link back to my list of things that vested interests have sought to deny? There is just no comparison between your list and mine; it was better to be safe rather than sorry; and hindsight is such a wonderful thing!

However, as if to add insult to stupidity injury, you had to go and mention DDT: With regard to DDT (et al), the retrospective denunciation of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (i.e. a critique of the aggressive marketing of highly-ineffective & highly-toxic chemicals when the identification & introduction of natural predators was much cheaper & more effective in the long-term) is in fact one of the most… Read more

O’Neill is the editor of the multi-faceted, online magazine website Spiked, which describes itself as “…waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism [...and would be...] endorsed by free-thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx… if they were lucky enough to be around to read it.” Thus, there are two aspects to O’Neill’s critique of fear of AGW: (1) it is misanthropic and regressive; and (2) it is irrational and illiberal.

The only trouble with these beliefs is that they are deeply flawed: Dealing with AGW need not be any of these things. However, those with a vested interest in the continuance of “business as usual” want you to beleive that taking any serious action to tackle the problem is all of these things; and therein lies the problem: Their self-serving campaign has been immensely successful.

In a brief discussion of left-wing scepticism in Requiem for a Species, Clive Hamilton highlights the links between the erstwhile Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), Living Marxism magazine, and the Spiked website (pp.113-5). In spite of this, O’Neill is given a platform on websites like that of The Telegraph and the Global Warming Policy Foundation, demonstrating that one’s politics are irrelevant in the crusade to deny AGW.

I guess I should not be surprised at this, because Marxism is merely growth-fetishism without the Capitalism.

The problem is that perpetual growth is unsustainable in a closed system; the only way for us to escape that fact is to do as Stephen Hawking has suggested – and plan to colonise Space!
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N.B. This post was previously entitled “I’m no Leftie – but I know a man who is!” (and could have been entitled “Don’t attack people’s politics; attack their policies“), but is otherwise unedited…

I have been challenged to substantiate the following statement: The only conspiracy is one perpetrated by those with a financial interest in maintenance of the status quo; to encourage the continuing abdication of responsibility for a scientifically-inevitable problem that is already undeniably happening… So, here goes:

Oreskes and Conway’s book, Merchants of Doubt, sets out in great detail the way in which Jastrow, Singer and Seitz decided that, in the absence of Communists, they would fight Environmentalists instead: Oil Companies and Energy companies are only too pleased to fund their disinformation campaigns by bank-rolling organisations such as the George C. Marshall Institute and the Heartland Institute (and before them the Global Climate Coalition).

One of the greatest successes of these Merchants of Doubt has been to make the population at large distrust scientific authority in order to promote sales of the products of their paymasters and/or prevent them going into decline; or even from being banned.

Therefore, in roughly chronological order, they told us that:
smoking cigarettes is sophisticated;
smoking is not harmful;
organic pesticides are more effective than natural predators;
organic pesticides are safe;
CFC’s are not dangerous;
humanity is too insignificant to affect the atmosphere;
the hole in the ozone layer is not there;
CFC’s aren’t causing the hole in the ozone layer;
acid rain does not exist;
we are not causing acid rain;
we can’t afford to prevent acid rain;
pollution is preventing global warming; (this one was true – not that they cared)
humanity is too insignificant to affect climate;
the climate will not change faster than we can adapt to it;
the climate is not changing;
smoking does not cause cancer;
passive smoking is not dangerous; (see footnote below)
we are not causing the climate to change;
we cannot afford to prevent climate change;
climate change has stopped…

How does Fred Singer sleep at night? What he did to Roger Revelle (and Al Gore) was the most disgusting piece of cynical manipulation in the long history of cynical manipulation that is climate change denialism…

My previous posting summarised Chapter 1 (a mere 26 pages) of Oreskes and Conway’s brilliant new book; whereas this is an attempt to summarise Chapter 6, “The Denial of Global Warming” (a gargantuan 47 pages). However, fear not, this will be very brief. Having read it (i.e. Chapter 6), I have not got time to do more than outline the central premise of the book, i.e. that the entire edifice of AGW denialism was constructed by a very small band of highly influential intellectuals (none of whom were climate scientists); with Fred Singer (b.1924) seemingly the lynch pin of the whole sordid thing (aided and abetted by the late Robert Jastrow (1925-2008), the late William (Bill) Nierenberg (1919-2000), and the late Frederick Seitz (1911-2008)).

Oreskes and Conway trace the history of AGW denial all the way from the late 70s to the present day. However, the real campaign (as we can recognise it today) kicked-off after James Hansen stated, in his testimony to a Congressional Hearing, that AGW had already started (in June 1988). In the early years, the key corporate players were the George C. Marshall Institute (GCMI), the World Petroleum Congress, and the CATO Institute, with the campaign later being spearheaded by the Global Climate Coalition (GCC).

Apart from the disgraceful antics of Fred Singer (to which I will come to in due course), the worst aspect to the whole thing was the way in which the GCMI – bereft of any communists to fight – turned its guns on those they saw as “alarmist” environmentalists; and James Hansen was their first target: In a highly cynical move, they presented his data (for CO2 only) to the White House in their 1991 report (”Global Warming: What does the science tell us?”) in such a way that their own data (blaming the Sun) seemed to be an infinite improvement on Hansen’s; whereas in fact the complete opposite was – and is – true. This is because they did not present Hansen’s data for CO2 + Volcanoes + Sun (unlike the GCMI, he had considered all the options)… Despite the fact that the IPCC exposed this deliberate misrepresentation of both sets of data, it remained the core of the GCC argument until it was disbanded in 2002 (claiming its work was done).

Fred Singer’s successful campaign to claim that Roger Revelle had changed his mind about AGW before he died (and trash the reputation of Al Gore by association as well) – which included successfully suing for libel those that tried to put the record straight – is well summarised elsewhere. Therefore, I will not do more than to say that, on the expiration of a 10-year gagging order Singer obtained on winning his case, the truth is now in the public domain. However, you will (of course) not find it on any denialist website, so try this one instead!

I could go on but, to be honest, the whole thing makes me feel sick… Furthermore, upon reflection, I think this will have to be the last posting for bit (while absent from My Telegraph, I have been very active on JamesDelingpole.com), as I really must focus on the theoretical groundwork for – as opposed to research on – my MA dissertation on Climate Change Scepticism (but don’t worry I won’t be quoting any of you)…

No doubt Charlie Brooker would have described the famous atomic physicist, the late Frederick Seitz (1911-2008), as incapable of “leaning more to the right if he had (had) his right leg blown off!” However, in their new book, Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway describe him as having been, “…hawkish, superior, technophilic, and communophobic…” (p.29). He certainly seems to have played a central role in generating the modern tendency not to believe what authority figures such as scientists and politicians say (and who can blame us, eh?). The first chapter of the book is entitled “Doubt is our product”, which tells the story of at least 50 years- and 100 million US dollars– worth of misinformation foisted on the general public as a result of helpful scientists and complicit politicians alike; the implications of which are still very much with us today.

In the 1930’s, a number of Germans studies had established a clear link between smoking and lung cancer (hitherto a very rare disease). Sadly, because of its association with Nazism, this research was not well publicised after World War II. However, by the 1950’s numerous American studies had repeated the research and validated the conclusions. As a result, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) was formed in 1953, to challenge the mounting scientific evidence that smoking is bad for you. In 1964, following a series of articles in peer-reviewed journals, the US surgeon general, issued his own report on “Smoking and Health”, which reviewed over 7000 separate studies involving over 150 experts and concluded that smoking was indeed the most likely cause of the twentieth century’s lung cancer epidemic; pointing out that smokers were 20 times more likely to contract the disease than non-smokers. In 1969, advertising of smoking on TV and radio was banned and, not surprisingly, the rate at which people quit smoking continued to accelerate.

Although 125 lawsuits were filed against cigarette manufacturers between 1954 and 1979, only 9 ever went to trial; and none was successful. This was mainly due to the work of the TIRC, who used the fact that nothing is ever certain in science to deny the reality of overwhelming evidence to suggest a strong causal link between smoking and developing lung cancer.

After receiving an annual research grant of 500,000 US dollars from RJ Reynolds at the Rockerfeller Institute from 1975 to 1979, Frederick Seitz went to work for the tobacco giant to head-up its ongoing campaign to disseminate doubt. As we now know, he was extremely successful in that it took until 2006 for the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to win its case (brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act), in which the tobacco industry was found guilty of having “devised and executed a scheme to deceive consumers and potential consumers” regarding the health risks of smoking that their own executives had known about since the 1950’s. Furthermore, those same executives had also known that nicotine was addictive since at least 1963, but it was not until 2009 that the FDA was finally given the authority to regulate tobacco as an addictive drug.

People in America and all around the world have, quite understandably, been left with the feeling that their governments have stood by, happy to receive huge tax revenues from an industry which both they – and those involved in the business – knew was likely to kill at least 50% of long-term smokers. Along the way, in court case after court case, the tobacco industry had used friendly experts (whose research programmes they had funded for years) to play with words; and perpetuate the myth that residual uncertainty is the same thing as reasonable doubt, which it patently is not.

It is therefore ironic that the campaign run by the tobacco companies for over 50 years to convince people that smoking was not dangerous has, in no small way, contributed to the current all-pervasive cynicism and mistrust of all kinds of authority figures that we live with today. Worse still, this cynicism and mistrust has since been exploited by an identical campaign of denial and obfuscation by the fossil fuel lobby; in order to perpetuate the myth that climate change induced by the burning of fossil fuels is not dangerous either.

Not satisfied with that, we now find that big business is now conducting a copycat campaign, to trash the reputation of the pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson, re-write history and claim that the indiscriminate use of incredibly toxic biocides (otherwise known as systemic pesticides) such as DDT is a good idea. However, that is another story (i.e. chapter in the book)…